The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
Some enterprises use computers to provide an online social network that enables real-time collaboration for their users. An online social network is a digitized representation of human interaction transmitted for a wider audience. Whereas the audience for a conventional conversation between two people may be limited to those in close audible proximity between those two people, a conversation that takes place on an online social network is not bound by such physical constraints. Any other person or user who is interested in following an online conversation may do so. An online social network sends information proactively via a real-time news stream, or network feed. Users can subscribe to follow individuals and/or groups to receive broadcast updates about various events and activities. Users can also post messages on the profiles of other members of the online social network to collaborate on various events and activities. An online social network may provide some information to users through information graphics. Information graphics, or infographics, are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly. Infographics can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system's ability to see patterns and trends. If a user of an online social network desires to view an infographic that depicts information from multiple different online social networks, the user accesses an infographic that uses a commercially available social media tool, such as Radian 6, Getsatisfaction.com, Gnip, InvisibleTech, KANA, Klout, Jive, Lithium, Sysomos, Techrigy, or Visible. Some social media tools can extract relevant posts from social networks, and other sources of user comments, to provide aggregated levels of trends, patterns, and sentiment analysis based on keyword-centric information. Social media tools may use algorithms that score and rank influences in a social network. The influence scores may be computed based on a network structure metric (such as a number of followers or page rank) or an activity-centric metric in a social network (such as frequency of posts, responses, number of likes or comments). However, an infographic supported by a social media tool does not appear in real-time to a user because of the length of time required for the social media tool to update the infographic with the tremendous amount of information analyzed from multiple online social networks. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide techniques that enable a database system to improve the performance, efficiency, and the ease of use for updating infographics for multiple online social networks.